#70: The Once and Future Crime Busters

After our mysterious encounter with our art history professor, we broke off and scattered about the museum to select a painting or statue to write about. I chose a large canvas by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) entitled Cotopaxi (1862), a large tableaux that filled up an entire gallery wall, or so it seemed to me, featuring a volcano erupting. Smoke billowed up into the stratosphere, creating a blood red sky around a setting sun, with lush, colorful jungles stretching toward you in the foreground. There was even a little South American man and burro on a path watching the whole thing. Ever since school trips in childhood, it had been my favorite painting in the whole museum; I could stand in front of it and have it fill my whole field of vision for hours at a time. I remembered a teacher in grade school telling us it was an allegory for the Civil War that was waging in the American South when it was painted, so I threw that in my paper, although my guess was Professor Joshua bar-Joseph, whom his teaching fellow Michele Selket referred to by the mystical nickname Doctor Messiah, would consider such pedestrian interpretation overly-determined and literal-minded.